How things look through an Oregonian's eyes

October 31, 2006

John, oh John. What was going through your unthinking mind? One week before the election. All you have to do is keep your mouth shut and not get in the way of the rising Democratic tide.

But, no. You can't resist attempting a lame joke about how if college students aren’t smart and don’t study hard, they’ll end up stuck in Iraq.

Understood: you were trying to say that Bush is a fool who did just that.

A Kerry aide told CNN that the prepared statement, which had been designed to criticize President Bush, "was mangled in delivery."

Kerry was supposed to say, "I can't overstress the importance of a great education. Do you know where you end up if you don't study, if you aren't smart, if you're intellectually lazy? You end up getting us stuck in a war in Iraq."

But that message didn’t come across. I watched the clip of you on cable news several times. Like almost everyone else, at first I thought you were warning that students who can’t cut it academically end up in the armed forces, fighting interminably in Iraq.

It was only after I heard a Democratic apologist put the progressive politically correct spin on your remarks that I interpreted you differently.

Well, the cat’s out of the bag. The more you try to explain yourself, the more this story will hang around and continue to embarrass your party. My suggestion is that you hole up until after November 7 and let other Democrats do the campaigning from now on.

You’re obviously not cut out to be a spokesman for the Dems. Just like you weren’t cut out to be president of the United States.

October 30, 2006

Aren’t you envious, rest of the country? We voters here in Oregon, every last one of us, get to fill out our ballots in the comfort of our homes. Then we stick them in the mail, civic duty having been completed almost effortlessly.

I make it even easier on myself by copying my wife’s ballot. Last night she sat at the kitchen table, thick voter’s pamphlet in hand, reading the qualifications of every obscure candidate and the pros and cons of ballot measures that we were undecided about.

This morning, per our tradition, I picked up her not-yet-sealed ballot, laid it on my lap next to mine, and dutifully mirrored her thoughtful choices. Now, having revealed this to the blogosphere, I must worry about a knock on the door from jack-booted election police.

They come at 4 am, don’t they, when resistance is at its lowest? Maybe I should get to bed earlier the next couple of nights.

For I noted this warning on the back of our ballots:

Any person who, by use of force or other means, unduly influences an elector to vote in any particular manner or to refrain from voting is subject to a fine.

And when Laurel signed the back of the envelope in which her ballot is mailed, she certified that:

I voted my ballot and (did not unnecessarily show it to anyone);
This is the only ballot I have voted this election.

Grammatically, I’m not sure what to make of the parentheses. Regardless, I’ve got some comebacks ready if our voting behavior is challenged.

First, it was indeed necessary for Laurel to show me her ballot because I’m too lazy to pour over the voter’s pamphlet, trying to decide which of the candidates competing for positions on the Marion Soil and Water Conservation District deserve my support.

Second, I’m Laurel’s husband. She unduly influences me all of the time. That’s what wives do. Voting in an election shouldn’t be an exception to this marital rule. I’m pretty sure the Supreme Court will back me up on this if our case goes that far.

Turning to the substance of our voting, I was chagrined to notice today that the progressive web site Blue Oregon had quoted my off-the-cuff advice to vote “no” on every ballot measure in a post about how bloggers are voting.

Laurel and I voted “yes” on Measure 44, which expands the Oregon Prescription Drug Program. And I didn’t do so just because Laurel told me to. It’s a no-brainer.

Measure 42, however, took some thought. This prohibits insurance companies from using credit scores in calculating rates or premiums. It’s being sponsored by notorious (and convicted) conservative activist Bill Sizemore. That alone is almost enough reason to vote against it.

But I heard right-wing Portland talk show host Lars Larson railing against Measure 42, so that was almost enough reason to vote for it. What to do? It’s a dilemma, as Kristin Flickinger says in “My Measure 42 Conspiracy Theory.”

Laurel eventually decided to vote “no” on 42 and I followed her lead, dutiful geisha-like husband that I am. She told me that it makes sense to base insurance premiums for businesses on credit worthiness. And if individuals with poor credit histories aren’t happy with an insurance company’s premium, she says it would be possible for them to switch to a competitor with a different rating procedure.

Lastly, we’re proud—and, frankly, amazed—to have voted for a Republican this time around. Yes, Marion County Commissioner Janet Carlson got our votes. Laurel has found Carlson to be open-minded and supportive toward the groundwater protection issues that my activist wife has discussed with the county commissioners.

So even though I said “Come November, vote Democratic,” this admonition shouldn’t be followed slavishly. There are some votable Republicans out there; it just takes some digging to find them.

October 28, 2006

How is it that German police can disarm a man wielding a samurai sword without hurting him, by using a broomstick, while Washington county police shoot and kill a teenager holding a three-inch fishing knife, and an unarmed mentally ill man dies after three Portland policemen rough him up?

According to a news report, in Hamburg, Germany a man swung a samurai sword violently at police as they tried to disarm him. If this happened in Oregon almost certainly he would have been filled with bullets.

But the polizei used a broomstick to subdue him. Check out the videotape. It puts Portland-area police to shame. Guess they should bring over some German police to show them how to use guts rather than a Glock to save lives.

I know something about samurai swords (katanas). I have two of them, shown here unsheathed. I’ve trained extensively with them in martial arts classes, using wooden practice swords (bokken).

Samurai swords are fearsome weapons. A lot more fearsome than a knife with a three-inch blade. A National Geographic channel special, “Fight Science,” concluded that a katana is the ultimate sword (compared to a straight Tai Chi sword or a curved broadsword).

Here’s what the German police had to deal with.

And here’s a snapshot from the video of how they handled him. A policeman on the right uses a broomstick to push the man’s arm down while other police on the left grab him.

Pretty simple. Nobody got hurt. Because the polizei (1) have more balls than Oregon police and (2) don’t have a reflex reaction to pull out a gun when it isn’t necessary.

In the Sunday Opinion section, a retired Portland police officer, Jim Bellah, wrote, "I seriously doubt anyone who is being critical [of the Lukus Glenn slaying] has ever had to face that kind of situation."

I have faced that kind of situation several times, and I am very thankful that I did not kill the person who was wielding the knife. I can sleep at night. An officer who has taken the step to end another person's life is hardly an expert on other possible options.

As a police officer for many years during the turbulent 1960s and '70s in a major metropolitan area, I faced and dealt with drunks with knives, and not-so-drunks with guns. I do not feel that makes me an expert, either, but I do believe that three officers facing a drunk teenager with a three-inch knife could have disarmed him without killing him, without getting cut themselves, and most surely not risking death.
Glenn is dead because two officers chose to shoot him and end his young life. There has to be a better way.

I’ve said before that police need more martial arts training. In confrontations maybe they’ll get some bloody noses and bruises. But they’re sworn to serve and protect, not kill without reason.

October 26, 2006

A few years of watching the Measure 37 nightmare unfold has turned Oregonians off to this ill-considered effort to trash the state’s land use laws. A poll finds that Oregon voters would now reject Measure 37 by a wide margin (48 percent “no” to only 29 percent “yes”).

So much for the flimsy argument that Oregonians support mining in a national monument and putting a gravel pit in a residential neighborhood—two real-life examples of Measure 37 claims—just because it passed with 61 percent of the vote in 2004.

As I noted in a previous post, voters were conned by Oregonians in Action and other opponents of land use planning into believing that Measure 37 was all about fairness. In reality it unfairly created a privileged class of property owners who don’t have to comply with laws that apply to everyone else.

Loaded Orygun and the Sightline Institute summarize other key findings of the poll. (Full results of the poll, which was commissioned by the Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund and the Isaak Walton League of America, are described here).

Yesterday Laurel took part in a Vancouver, Washington press conference where she and a neighbor, Don Dean, talked about the danger a nearby Measure 37 claim poses to the groundwater in our area.

Wednesday my wife got her fifteen seconds of quasi-fame on a KOIN news segment which I fortuitously taped after Laurel phoned and told me that a Portland TV station had interviewed her.

October 24, 2006

The more I learn about the Oregonian’s endorsement of Ron Saxton for governor, the screwier it looks.

Sunday the Editorial Page Editor, Bob Caldwell, revealed that he alone made the call on the Saxton endorsement, even though a majority (six) of the ten-member board leaned toward Kulongoski.

So this is Screwy Factoid #1. The gubernatorial endorsement of the state’s largest newspaper should have said, “Bob Caldwell favors Ron Saxton for governor.” One guy, one personal opinion.

Instead, the editorial ended with:

It is a leap of faith to endorse a former school board chairman over a sitting governor. If all was well, we would recommend that voters re-elect Kulongoski. But the times demand a fresh look at Oregon's problems and Saxton brings an open, independent mind to the task. We recommend that voters select him as their next governor.

We? There’s no “We”! There’s “Me,” Bob Caldwell. If a vote had been taken of the editorial board members, it would have been 6-4 in favor of Kulonogoski. Or, since one of the six was a wishy-washy supporter of the incumbent, 5-4 with an abstention.

Kings and queens get to refer to themselves as the royal “We.” And editorial writers can, too, as Wikipedia points out, when he or she is a spokesman for the publication. But in this case Caldwell was speaking for a minority of the editorial board.

This should have been revealed in the endorsement, not after the fact. In today’s Oregonian, letter writer Helena Wolfe tells it like it should have been:

It was shocking to learn that the endorsement of Ron Saxton by The Oregonian editorial board came down to the personal preferences of Editorial Page Editor Bob Caldwell, even though the board narrowly favored Ted Kulongoski ("So, who made the Saxton decision -- and who did not," Oct. 22).

Given the close split among board members, abstaining from endorsing either candidate would have been the more responsible action for the newspaper to take.

As things stand, Saxton now has a soundbite to use in his advertising, and Kulongoski's stance has been irreparably damaged. The Oregonian should have just presented the strengths and weaknesses of each candidate and honestly told the public that the board was too divided to make an endorsement.

My Screwy Factoid #2 cost me $2.95 to discover. This is how much my VISA card got charged to obtain an archived file of an October 10, 2004 Oregonian piece by the public editor, “How the choice was made to endorse Kerry.”

But it was worth three bucks to read about how the editorial board’s presidential endorsement process worked two years ago. Some excerpts:

No vote is taken on endorsements; instead, Caldwell looks for a consensus to emerge and makes the call. In 2000, five members had pushed for Bush. But three of those five, including Caldwell and Rowe, were supporting or leaning toward the Democrat this time. Only Stickel and columnist David Reinhard ended up arguing that the newspaper should endorse Bush.

…Stickel [the publisher] was disappointed by the decision but says he respects it. Although he could have overridden the choice, he considers that foolish. “Why would you have an editor of the editorial board, why would you have six associate editors, if you’re going to sit there and tell them what to do?” he says.

Good question.

I wish Bob Caldwell would have asked it of himself before he overrode the gubernatorial preference of a majority of the editorial board. What’s foolish for one overrider is foolish for another. Stickel was smart enough to recognize that an endorsement based on one person’s personal opinion is meaningless.

Which, we now know, the Saxton endorsement is.

[I’ll include the full 2004 article below, thereby getting more of my $2.95 money’s worth.]

October 22, 2006

A VW bus that has to be pushed or rolled to start it. A family comprised of wildly disparate members, including a heroin-snorting grandpa, a platitude-spouting motivational speaker father, and a Nietzsche-obsessed son who hasn’t said a word for nine months.

What’s not to like about “Little Miss Sunshine”? We saw the movie last Friday, thanks to Salem Cinema’s decision to bring it back for another run. It’s a feel-good tribute to eccentric dysfunction, something I know more than a little about.

Automotively, I felt right at home watching the family of Olive, an aspiring seven year-old beauty queen, coax their VW from New Mexico to California so she could enter the Little Miss Sunshine pageant.

In 1968 I became the owner of my mother’s ’57 VW Bug when she got a ’67 model. I loved it. And I hated it. VW’s of that era were equally (1) marvels of German engineering and (2) pieces of crap.

That’s what made them so interesting. You never knew whether Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde was going to appear when you turned the key. I remember the day my VW got me safely through a nasty Sierra snowstorm. I also recall driving along scraping ice from the windshield. On the inside.

There were a lot of positive qualities to my ’57 Bug. The heater wasn’t one of them.

So it was an enjoyable flashback to watch the VW in “Little Miss Sunshine” drive the family crazy with little quirks like a horn that wouldn’t shut off and a broken clutch that required the push-starting routine.

When my VW’s engine compartment caught fire on a San Jose street in the late ’60s it didn’t surprise me at all. I just pulled over, grabbed a fire extinguisher, and called it another day in the life of a Volkswagen owner.

I’m horribly un-mechanical. But with the aid of that marvelous book, “How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive,” I learned how to crawl under my successor VW (a Karmann Ghia) with a screwdriver and get it running again when, for some forgotten reason, it decided that it didn’t want to start. Which was frequent, as I recall.

Still, I remember those cars with much more fondness than the blandly reliable Japanese models that, when I became a family man, I eventually turned to. A dash of dysfunction adds spice. Too much of it gives you psychic indigestion. But too little leaves a hunger for the wild side.

Growing up, I took for granted that the abnormal was normal. For that, I’m now grateful to my dysfunctional nuclear and extended family. We had alcoholism, divorce (lots of it), affairs, scandals.

I don’t know if the “cocktail hour” is still common. It was in my family during my pre-teen years. As the youngest in the room, usually, during family gatherings my job would be to hand out the drinks. Then I’d perch in a corner, sip a coke, and listen to the gossip.

I accepted all the dysfunction as part of usual family life, not having any other basis for comparison. My uncle played the bagpipes. And, polo. (Not at the same time, though, so far as I know). I thought that was normal too. Now I honor him for his eccentricity, and am sorry that I gave up so soon on the starter bagpipes that he sent me.

When I became a teenager I went through my own existential despair phase. I wasn’t into Nietszche, unlike Little Miss Sunshine’s Dwayne. But the weirder side of Bob Dylan (was there any other side to him in the ‘60s?) touched my dark soul. Also, Henry Miller, who wrote in “Tropic of Capricorn”:

But if you would laugh when others laugh and weep when they weep you must be prepared to die as they die and live as they live. That means to be right and to get the worst of it at the same time. It means to be dead while you are alive and alive only when you are dead. In this company the world always wears a normal aspect, even under the most abnormal conditions. Nothing is right or wrong but thinking makes it so.

I included this quote in a letter that I wrote to my high school girlfriend, Mary. She and her family were wonderfully functional. They helped keep me on as even a keel as I could manage during some extra-dysfunctional adolescent years. For that I’m also grateful.

However, I still resonate with Henry Miller. You’ve got to laugh and weep on your own terms, not anyone else’s. That’s what made “Little Miss Sunshine” so appealing to me. The members of this family march to their own dysfunctional drummers.

And by the time you get to the closing credits, they seem like the most engagingly normal people you’ll ever meet.

Thousands of people had access to the NIE, which embarrassed the Bush Administration by concluding that the Iraq war is fanning the flames of terrorism and breeding deep resentment of the United States in the Islamic world.

But on September 29, Republican committee member Ray LaHood of Illinois sent a letter to Hoekstra saying that a Democratic staffer requested the NIE document from National Intelligence Director John Negroponte three days before a Sept. 23 story by the New York Times leaked some of its conclusions.

LaHood admitted, "I have no credible information to say any classified information was leaked from the committee's minority staff, but the implications of such would be dramatic.”

Yes, Ray, it would. Just as there was no credible evidence that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction or was involved with Al Qaeda. But gosh, if there had been such evidence, that would have been dramatic.

Lots of things would be dramatic if they were true. It’s the job of mature adults who are in charge of our national security to distinguish fact from fiction. Here’s one more example, among many, of how Republicans are focused on protecting their political power rather than on protecting the United States.

Ranking Democratic committee member Jane Harman has told Hoekstra that his evidence-free suspension of the staffer is outrageous and an abuse of power. She says that Hoekstra has admitted that his action is a retaliation for Harman’s release of a non-classified report on Republican ex-congressman Duke Cunningham, briber extraordinaire.

It’s all politics, 24/7, with this Republican administration. National security, deficits, natural disasters, lack of health care, poverty, environmental problems—none of this really matters to Bush, Rove, and Co.

How do we maintain power? How can this be used for political advantage? That’s the neo-con mindset this country has been suffering with since January 2001. Americans are tired of it.

This Hoekstra B.S. is just one more reason why the Republicans are going to take a beating at the polls next month.

October 18, 2006

Come November, vote Democratic. And if you’re in Oregon, vote “no” on every Oregon ballot measure.
[Update: Oops. When I impulsively wrote the above I'd forgotten about Measure 44, which expands the Oregon Prescription Drug Program. It deserves a "yes." Otherwise, I still advise "no" on the other measures. See my post, "I copy Laurel's ballot. Are we lawbreakers?"]

The big fire a couple of years ago has left whitening snags around the shoreline. Black Butte peeks over the treetops.

From another angle, and zoomed in, Black Butte becomes more of a presence. The fire lookout on the top of the mountain is just barely visible.

Laurel has a talent for matching, wherever she goes. Here she’s blending in with the fall color of the vine maples and Suttle Lake’s blue. (Her not-so-fashionable “necklace” is a dog whistle).

Speaking of Serena, the wonder pet, this is a study of Suttle Lake sunlight and shade featuring her and Laurel.

More vine maples. They weren’t quite as vibrant this October as last, perhaps due to the dry summer and fall.

Ah, we’ve got such an environmentally conscious dog. With just a smidgen of coaxing (well, maybe a bit more than that) Laurel got Serena to retrieve a plastic bottle floating ten feet or so off shore. She tried her best, but the bottle must have gotten attached to some fishing line or something. Still, we’ll be nominating her for Green Anti-Litter Dog of the Year.

This is my favorite photo from our walk. Dog on a dock, contemplating…something. For sure, a different order of reality from Saxton vs. Kulongoski and Republicans vs. Democrats. Without getting too philosophical, I'll still call it a more real reality.

October 16, 2006

Nobody other than a masochist says, “Oh joy, I’m going to have a colonoscopy today!”

So I’ve resisted having an endoscope snaked up my butt, even while sedated. I’d heard horror stories about people who suffered a lot of pain during a colonoscopy but were too zonked out to effectively communicate what was going on.

Then I learned about virtual (or CT) colonoscopy. It’s non-invasive (yes!) and doesn’t require sedation. Like most things medical there’s debate over whether conventional or virtual colonoscopy is better.

“CT colonoscopy with the use of a three-dimensional approach is an accurate screening method for the detection of colorectal neoplasia in asymptomatic average-risk adults and compares favorably with optical colonoscopy in terms of the detection of clinically relevant lesions.”

Good enough for me. My family doctor was willing to write a referral for this endoscopic alternative, and this morning my 58-year old body found itself poised to pass through the maw of Body View Diagnostic Scanning’s CT machine (they’re in Clackamas, Oregon right off I-205; phone 503-653-7226).

It took just half an hour to get both a heart scan and a virtual colonoscopy. The first was completely painless; the latter was a bit uncomfortable because of the carbon dioxide that gets pumped into the colon to inflate it.

But it still was a walk in the park compared to a regular colonoscopy. The preparation procedure isn’t as onerous and there’s no sedation recovery time. Nor any risk of complications, such as a bowel perforation.

The main drawback of a virtual colonoscopy is that suspicious polyps can’t be removed on the spot. However, Body View says that polyps are found in only 7-10% of patients, so I’ll take my chances (I get the results of the scan tomorrow).

It’s important to have a colonoscopy once you’re over 50. But many people don’t, because the procedure is intimidating. What helped to sell me on a virtual colonoscopy was the Boston Medical Center’s pitch to physicians.

It is one thing for doctors to recommend colon screening for their patients, it is another thing for doctors themselves (their spouses and/or parents) to have their own colons checked. Now that an accurate, quick, and safe test is available it is even less excusable to avoid or delay "clearing your colon." Colon screening by Virtual Colonoscopy , at least for a doctor and his family, should be as basic and instinctive as a mammogram for her and a PSA for him once a certain age is reached.

Similarly, the Body View staff told me that they perform quite a few virtual colonoscopies on gastroenterologists. If it’s good enough for MD’s, it’s good enough for me. And Laurel, who has had one also.

Still, neither of us enjoyed the frequent trips to the bathroom during the bowel cleansing that starts the day before the procedure. After 5:30 pm, when you chug down some magnesium citrate, you don’t want to stray far from your new best friend: the toilet.

This has to be done with a regular colonoscopy also, though. And we liked Body View’s more lenient dining guidelines on the day before the exam. I got to have a normal breakfast, then a light low fat/fiber lunch (for me, banana and pasta with plain tomato sauce).

Dinner at 5 pm, such as it was, consisted of a nutritional drink. Then it was cold turkey (or, rather, tofu) for this vegetarian until 10:00 am the next morning, when I was able to eat some post exam snacks provided by Body View.

I’m not used to going without solid food for almost 24 hours. I did a lot of starving-children-in-Africa visualizing to keep things in perspective. It was hard to get to sleep on a nearly empty stomach. While I lay there, initially passing the awake time by feeling sorry for myself, I eventually realized that this is what lots of people in the world experience every night.

Overall, my virtual colonoscopy wasn’t as difficult as I expected. I got used to feeling hungry after a while. I felt almost normal (albeit several pounds lighter) driving up the freeway to Portland this morning.

The two-person staff at Body View greeted me with a smile. They’re pleasant, competent, egalitarian, and refreshingly informal. After the exam I got to view my heart and colonoscopy scans on computer screens and hear a general explanation of the procedures. Plus, get some initial heart scan results.

My cardiac calcium plaque score was 4. Pretty good, but not perfect. This means that my risk of coronary artery disease is very unlikely, less than 10 percent. The Body View guy said that I scored better than about 78% of men my age. I told him that was good news. But since most American men my age are out of shape, overweight, and eat unhealthily, I didn’t consider it great news.

I ended up with a $1,141.25 VISA receipt for my share of the two scans. It was that high because I hardly ever go to the doctor and still had $750 left to meet on my $1,000 Regence Blue Cross deductible.

But as my family doctor said when we discussed the pros and cons of getting these scans (mainly the heart scan; getting a colonoscopy is a no-brainer for anyone over 50), “It just depends on what you want to spend your money on.”

I told her that for eleven hundred bucks and change I could get a nice new computer. Or some other electronic toy. However, if I ended up with undiagnosed colon cancer or heart disease, I’d kick myself for not choosing the diagnostic tests instead.

Do yourself a favor. If you can afford it, or even if you feel that you can’t, get a colonoscopy after you pass the half century mark. With the virtual variety, you’ll hardly feel a thing.

Except a toilet seat, quite a few times, the day before. And some stomach rumblings when midnight snack time arrives and you can't even drink a glass of water. All in all, a small price to pay to markedly reduce the risk of dying from colon cancer.

October 15, 2006

I usually find that the newspaper’s editorials make sense, even if I don’t agree with their position. But that wasn’t the case here. The Loaded Orygun blog sums up my attitude exactly: “The O has lost its fucking mind.”

How is it possible for the Oregonian to start off with this rendition of the state’s problems, then endorse Republican Ron Saxton?

This state has slipped and fallen. School funding is below the national average. Oregon is near the bottom in public support of universities. The number of troopers patrolling highways is only half of what the state mustered 30 years ago. Oregon's system of public finance is a mess, and Oregon, virtually alone among states, has no rainy day fund.

Saxton has never met a tax cut he didn’t like. Saxton says he has no inclination to seek more money to pay for needed services. When asked specifically where he would find efficiencies in state government that could produce savings for other programs, Saxton can’t come up with anything substantial.

He’s all talk and no plan. Yet somehow the Oregonian claims that Saxton brings new ideas for increasing public support of education, law enforcement, health care, and such. Well, what are they? I’ve been following the debates between Kulongoski and Saxton. I haven’t heard one practical positive policy idea come out of Saxton’s mouth.

It looks to me like someone at the Oregonian decided to endorse Saxton, then desperately tried to find reasons for that personal choice. He or she failed. Dismally.

Again, it wouldn’t bother me if the Oregonian has reasonable reasons for its endorsement. But the disconnect between the bottom line, “Vote for Saxton,” and the editorial’s content is disturbingly obvious.

The Oregonian blew it. Big time. Just like they did with their endorsement of George Bush in 2000, which made predictions that were spectacularly off the mark

Just start typing anywhere and you’re typing into the search box. Cool. No click and type.

Do a web page search and some images often will pop up on the right side. No need to do a separate image search. Nice. (But my “Brian Hines” search revealed a guy who doesn’t look a whole lot like me.)

Get to the end of the first ten search results, click on “more web pages,” and bingo!, there they are. Ten more scroll into view. No waiting for a new page to load. Lovely.

Google, if this is the direction you’re heading, keep it up. Don’t know how you’re going to make money without ads, but this frequent search engine user is willing to pay you a few bucks a year to keep SearchMash ad free.

And thanks for throwing in an unexpected SearchMash gift. Just now I visited the site and saw a hitherto unseen invitation to explore common searches by other users. “Why not?” I told myself.

Exploring away, on its own SearchMash offered up this page. Sweet. It’s almost as if SearchMash could read my male mind. Maybe that’s Google’s next technical breakthrough. If so, a lot of women are going to be grateful.

October 12, 2006

Supporters of Oregon’s Measure 37, which trashed our state’s land use laws, like to talk about property rights. But now Oregon is facing property wrongs caused by the inherent unfairness of Measure 37, which created a privileged class of landowner.

It features six case studies of the ill effects of Measure 37. Our Spring Lake Estates neighborhood is one of them. As I described in my previous post, a hydrogeologist has found that commonly-owned Spring Lake is threatened by a 215 acre subdivision.

The Measure 37 claimant, Leroy Laack, plans to sell 82 lots, each of which would have its own well. Currently his land is zoned for exclusive farm use. If it weren’t for his being able to roll back the clock via Measure 37, Marion County would require him to subdivide into parcels of at least ten acres if he wanted to change his zoning to AR (acreage residential).

So our neighborhood stands to get screwed, water-wise, while Laack plans to make out like a bandit, money-wise. Laurel and I are doing our best to right this wrong, along with many of our neighbors. The Sightline Report says (p.11):

Laurel Hines is another resident concerned about the new development’s effects on her property. She says she moved to Oregon in 1979 from the Midwest partially because she respected the state’s land use laws. Laurel says that in contrast to the shared sense of community at Spring Lake Estates, the adjacent landowner so far appears unconcerned about the impact of the proposed development on the community.

“We expected things to be the way they were and that the land use laws would protect us, and now we can’t depend on them,” Hines says.

Don Dean, a neighbor of ours, is quoted as saying that he believes he voted for Measure 37, but didn’t take as much time as he should have to review and understand the measure.

Like a lot of other people.

Oregonians got conned into voting for Measure 37 by Oregonians in Action, which made it look as if this would help people overcome heartless government bureaucrats who were preventing them from building a single home on long-held family land.

The reality is far different.

As this report shows, it’s a gravel mine moving in next door to an alpaca farm; it’s building a geothermal plant in a national monument; it’s surrounding a working forest with suburbs; it’s losing farmland and gaining lawsuits; it’s a subdivision sucking up a lake’s water supply; it’s farmers not being able to sell their land because of an adjacent Measure 37 claim.

Oregonians were deceived into passing a destructive law. Hopefully the states that are voting on similar proposals in November will learn from our experience.

Arizona, California, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, and Washington: vote “No” on these so-called pay or waive schemes. Oregon used to be admired as a pioneering state. I guess we still are, but now we’re showing the rest of the country what not to do.

Fair land use laws protect everybody’s interests. Heed the lesson of the Sightline report:

In each case profiled here, Measure 37 has allowed one property owner to harm the interests, and sometimes the property values, of neighbors.

October 10, 2006

Here’s what Oregon’s Measure 37 looks like. An 82 lot subdivision next to our Spring Lake Estates neighborhood. This is a map of the first phase, 43 lots. Which means 43 homes, with 43 wells, on land intended for exclusive farm use that already has limited groundwater.

Crazy.

If you voted for Measure 37, which exempted some property owners from complying with the state’s land use laws, you probably thought the face of Measure 37 was Dorothy English—a 92 year-old who, ads in favor of the measure said, just wanted the right to develop her land so she could give some property to her children and fund her retirement.

The reality is much different. It’s subdivisions on land that can’t sustain such dense development. My wife and I know that, because we’re experts on the groundwater problems here in the south Salem hills.

And a licensed hydrogeologist, Larry Eaton, also knows that. He’s prepared a report for our neighborhood association that concludes the Spring Lake Estates water rights likely will be adversely impacted by the Laack subdivision.

There will be lots of other adverse impacts also. This map shows the AR (acreage residential) properties that border the proposed cross-hatched subdivision on two sides. The Laack property currently is zoned EFU, exclusive farm use.

Those who bought property next to that farm land figured that either it would stay zoned that way, or there would be a fair and open governmental process if a change in the zoning were to be considered.

But Measure 37 isn’t fair. Or open. It created a privileged class of landowners in Oregon. These people can do what they want with their property, even if it hurts the value of adjacent properties that still have to comply with land use laws.

Currently Marion County requires that if land is re-zoned from EFU to AR, the lot sizes in the residential development have to be at least ten acres. Yet Laack and his three co-owners (none of whom qualify for Measure 37 other than him) are planning to sell lots that mostly are two to three acres. Again, special treatment for a few at the expense of the many.

Ron Saxton, the Republican candidate for governor, wants to continue the unfairness. Ted Kulongoski has been pretty wishy-washy on Measure 37, but he and his fellow Democratic office-seekers still deserve your vote if you want to restore equity to Oregon’s land use laws.

Environmentally they aren’t as Green as I’d like. However, these days Oregon Republicans love the prospect of putting an open-pit mine in the Newberry National Volcanic Monument south of Bend.

Their vision of Oregon is to Californicate it. If I wanted to be surrounded by subdivisions that devoured farm land, I’d be living in the L.A. area. Help stop the Measure 37 madness. Vote for Oregon Democrats in November.

October 08, 2006

Sometimes tough love is needed. Straight talk. Telling it like it is. Black Butte Ranch Restaurant, my friend, you’ve got to get your serving-time act together. Plus, what you serve has got to include a decent vegetarian entrée.

Two “got to’s.” Not much to ask. You can handle it. Then we’ll keep coming back. We love looking out your floor to ceiling windows at snow-capped mountains, a meadow, grazing horses, geese on the pond. The atmosphere can’t be beat.

But no matter how beautiful the setting, diners get cranky when they wait half an hour to have their order taken, wait another half an hour to get two basic dinner salads, and then, a full hour and a half after sitting down at their table, are served an unappealing vegetarian dish that would have brought a smile to Bugs Bunny. But not to us.

Yes, I did tell our waiter to go heavy on the vegetables and light on the pasta. However, it looked like the chef poured a pail of cut cooked carrots over some linguine, added a dash of broccoli and mushrooms, and called it an entrée.

If either Laurel or me was afraid of orange, we’d have run screaming for the exit when the plates were put down. It was an awesome sight. To rabbits.

Look: I’ve been a vegetarian for thirty-seven years. It’s common for me to walk into a classy restaurant like yours, open up the menu, and see there isn’t a single entrée that didn’t once walk, fly, or swim.

No problem. I just plead my case before the waiter. “Hey, we’re vegetarians. We don’t eat meat or fish. Could the chef make us something special? Doesn’t need to be fancy. Just put together some grilled vegetables, rice or pasta, maybe some other side dishes from your menu?”

This usually works like a charm. In fact, at the very Black Butte Restaurant where we dined last night, over the years my wife and I have enjoyed the creativity that’s emerged from the kitchen in response to our vegetarian pleadings.

But last night we got off to an inauspicious beginning when the waiter looked at us with a deer-in-the-headlights stare when I went into my “Hey, we’re vegetarians” rap. Right away he tried to buy us off with a veggie appetizer, but we pressed for a real entrée.

Should have stuck with the appetizer, in retrospect. After a few bites, Laurel’s reaction was “I could have made something better than this back at the cabin.” She was right. And while I’ve got tremendous respect for my wife’s cooking skills, she’d be the first to admit that they are nowhere near chef-quality. So you’ve got a problem here.

We asked for something vegetarian. I can understand that requesting a kosher, gluten-free, macrobiotic, low-carb dinner might throw the kitchen for a loop. But vegetarian? That should be easy.

You never know when you might get a Hollywood star dining at Black Butte. Get the chef to think ahead, figure out a tasty dish that can be assembled from the ingredients you always have on hand, pin the recipe on a kitchen bulletin board, and have at it when a restaurant customer says that he or she is a vegetarian.

Better yet, make it your policy to always have a vegetarian entrée on the dinner menu. You might be surprised to discover how many people order it. I praised your grilled tofu Garden Plate three years ago but you changed the menu soon after to be entirely meaty and fishy, like it is now.

Big mistake, which you need to rectify if you want to stay on the good side of the Vegetarian Gods.

And us. Who also have some advice about how to handle over-taxed restaurant situations, like you experienced last night. Waiters and busboys were rushing around like crazy. Yet food took a very long time to arrive. We saw other diners frowning as they wrote on the comment card that accompanied the check, just as we did.

Restaurants, like people, have bad nights. We understand that. Your parking lot was full when we drove up. It looked like a party or reception of some sort was going on in your banquet area. Maybe that over-burdened your kitchen. Maybe a cook was sick. Maybe you were short-staffed otherwise (our waiter looked like a busboy given a temporary promotion).

Regardless, be upfront about it. If someone had said to us, “I’m sorry about how long you’ve had to wait. We’re not living up to our service standard. The reason is _______. We want to give you each of you a complimentary glass of wine in appreciation of your patience,” that would have smothered a lot of the frustrated fumes that were rising from our hungry heads.

But we never got anything but a brisk “Sorry for the delay” as our salads were dropped on our table an hour after we sat down. Even worse, we weren’t asked if we wanted ground pepper! I, horror of horrors!, had to use the regular pepper shaker rather than enjoy the ritual of the three-foot-long grinder being wielded above my (tasty) Lodge Salad.

Leisurely meals at a fine restaurant like yours can be enjoyable. However, the diners need to feel like they’re largely in control of the pace of the meal. We did a lot of unwanted lingering last night, made more unwantable by the fact of it being my birthday dinner.

Hey, I had presents to unwrap back at the cabin, some of which I hadn’t bought for myself, so I was curious to find out what they were. We both had better things to do than stare blankly around the dining room in a low-blood-sugar stupor, vaguely pondering why the people who were the most overweight and looked like heart attacks waiting to happen were the ones who ordered a thick steak.

We still love you, Black Butte Restaurant. We just hope you’re open to becoming ever more deserving of our adoration. Learn how to minimize long waits. And have your chef come up with a good vegetarian entrée.

October 06, 2006

I’m hoping the effect is long-lasting, since I inhaled enough THC in the 60’s to keep me Alzheimer’s-free for a thousand years (more or less; anyway, the whole universe could just be a speck in the eye of a Cosmic Dude who is just a speck in the eye…time’s got to be an illusion).

What a trip. All these years I’ve heard, “If you can remember the 60’s, you probably weren’t there.” Now it turns out that those cannabis-happy hippie days were good for the memory.

October 04, 2006

Carlos Rojas, one of our Tango instructors, says that Tango began in Buenos Aires as a human mating dance. Much as birds and other animals do, males had to compete for a limited supply of desirable females.

Dancing Tango demonstrated to a woman what kind of a mate a man would be. So Carlos likes to say that Tango is simple: “It’s just a gentleman walking with a lady so she will fall in love with him.”

Just as Carlos told us last night, Christine Denniston explains that in the late 1800s there was a massive influx of single male immigrants to Argentina. Women were scarce. The cliché is that Tango originated in the brothels of Buenos Aires, giving the men some entertainment while they waited for the services of a prostitute.

But Denniston points out that if all the prostitutes were occupied, leaving a bunch of men in the waiting room, then no woman was available to dance with the patrons. So it is unlikely that Tango was prostitute-inspired. However, it does appear that Tango was practiced in the brothel waiting rooms.

This is Denniston’s theory, which was echoed by Carlos in our Tango history lesson.

There were really only two practical ways for a man to get close to a woman under these circumstances [of lots of men and few women]. One was to visit a prostitute and the other was to dance.

With so much competition from other men on the dance floor, if a man wanted a woman to dance with him, it was necessary for him to be a good dancer, and being a good dancer only meant one thing. It didn't matter if he knew lots of fancy steps, or if the other men thought he was a good dancer. The only thing that mattered was that the woman in his arms had a good time when she danced with him - because with so many other men to choose from, if she didn't enjoy dancing with him she wouldn't do it again, and neither would her friends.

This meant that it was necessary for the men to practice together in order to be good enough to dance with the women. It is important to remember that this was a time before recorded music was available. The only kind of music was live music, and there would have been very little of it.

So if a group of men heard music playing they would jump at the chance to dance to it. In the brothels there would be live music and other men waiting. So it seems to me quite obvious that the clients of the brothels would have danced together while they waited, making the most of the opportunity to practice, not because they wanted to dance with a prostitute, but because they wanted to be able to dance well when they got the opportunity to dance with a woman who was not a prostitute.

It was the potential wives and sweethearts that lived in the tenement blocks - conventillos - that they were hoping for a chance to dance with. A prostitute took money from a man in return for her favours - a clear and simple transaction. To win a sweetheart in the real world took something more, and being a good dancer helped a lot.

Well, so far for Laurel and me our two-hour classes aren’t so romantic. Tango is a difficult dance to learn. Often we’ve got frowns on our faces as we try to figure out why a move isn’t working for us.

Every move is led and followed in Tango. We’ve been taught the eight basic steps, and quite a few other moves, but no pattern is intended to be repeated mechanically. It’s a template for improvisation. Life isn’t predictable. Neither is Tango.

Leading and following is still a challenge for us. Often I’ll be leading away then realize that Laurel has taken over. She’s doing her own thing and I’m following. After sixteen years of marriage I’ve got a lot of practice in that.

It made me feel better to read about a beginning Tango couple with the same problem.

Memories aside, by the time our regular teachers, Esteban and Nadia, return, we realize that we have a problem. In tango, the man leads and decides all the moves, with his partner following and receiving signals for the eights, double eights, turns, and so on, all the so-called figuras that catch most people's attention when they watch tango. This is difficult for me, since, like many wives, I am used to being the one who feels she should make all the important decisions.

Well, for a couple of hours a week, I figure that a woman should be able to suck it up and be the follower for a change. So we Tango on. With me leading. Mostly.

October 02, 2006

Terrorism is no joke. But how the British and American governments have been responding to it often is.

That’s why it was fitting I learned about the mostly phony binary explosives threat, which was supposed to be able to bring down an airplane with a tube of toothpaste and a bottle of water, in Funny Times, which reprinted Ted Rall’s expose of the overblown Homeland Security alert that kept our flying mouths dry until TSA relaxed the rules recently.

Which was the right thing to do, since there never was much reason to be concerned that terrorists would be able to mix some liquids or gels together and bingo!, fashion a powerful bomb.

For The Register reports in “Mass murder in the skies: was the plot feasible?” how unlikely it is that anyone would be able to concoct a brew capable of bringing down a plane from liquid carry-on items. Preparation of TATP, triacetone triperoxide, the jihadist’s explosive of choice, takes some serious work.

Rall says:

"First," wrote The Register, "you've got to get adequately concentrated hydrogen peroxide. This is hard to come by, so a large quantity of the three per cent solution sold in pharmacies might have to be concentrated by boiling off the water...Take your hydrogen peroxide, acetone, and sulfuric acid, measure them very carefully, and put them into drink bottles for convenient smuggling onto a plane.

It's all right to mix the peroxide and acetone in one container, so long as it remains cool. Don't forget to bring several frozen gel-packs (preferably in a Styrofoam chiller deceptively marked "perishable foods"), a thermometer, a large beaker, a stirring rod, and a medicine dropper. You're going to need them.

"It's best to fly first class and order champagne. The bucket full of ice water, which the airline ought to supply, might possibly be adequate...Once the plane is over the ocean, very discreetly bring all of your gear into the toilet. You might need to make several trips to avoid drawing attention.

Once your kit is in place, put a beaker containing the peroxide/acetone mixture into the ice water bath (champagne bucket), and start adding the acid, drop by drop, while stirring constantly. Watch the reaction temperature carefully. The mixture will heat, and if it gets too hot, you'll end up with a weak explosive. In fact, if it gets really hot, you'll get a premature explosion possibly sufficient to kill you, but probably no one else.

"After a few hours--assuming, by some miracle, that the fumes haven't overcome you or alerted passengers or the flight crew to your activities--you'll have a quantity of TATP with which to carry out your mission. Now all you need to do is dry it for an hour or two."

The conclusion is clear: "Certainly, if we can imagine a group of jihadists smuggling the necessary chemicals and equipment on board, and cooking up TATP in the lavatory, then we've passed from the realm of action blockbusters to that of situation comedy."

Yes, these days it’s difficult to separate Bush administration policies from satire. Such is Maureen Dowd’s point in a biting New York Times column about how similar George Bush is to comedian Ali G’s hilarious alter ego, Borat. (See continuation of this post).

Here’s a clip of the new Borat movie. Watch it. It’s a reminder that when Bush and company make you want to cry, a better response is to laugh at their antics. We’ve got a comical president, so why not smile some at his expense? At the same time, of course, working like crazy to elect replacements for his Republican minions this November.